If, as Megan complains, some of us who opposed the war in Iraq (it belatedly occurs to me that “doves” is too open to misreading) are a bit hung up on the whole who-was-right, who-was-wrong thing, perhaps this piece in Radar, looking at how pundits on opposite sides of the issue before the war have fared since, shows why. It probably steals a few bases by picking some hawkish pundits who were and continue to be successful as commentators on a variety of topics, while focusing on rather narrower, more obscure experts from the other side who mostly just haven’t become significantly less obscure over the past few years. Still, the general point is sound: I haven’t noticed any grand readjustment of public profiles based on how reliable their analysis turned out to be. Now, surely it’s true that the most important thing here is not who was right, but rather how all of us, whatever our positions in 2002, need to adjust our thinking by learning why certain people were right. That said, this requires that we start listening to those people a lot more than we had been.

One thing that might be helpful here is prediction registries, which have long been one of David Brin’s hobbyhorses. With prediction markets, the idea is to aggregate dispersed knowledge through the price system; the prediction registry has the simpler goal of building the largest possible track record for prognosticators and pontificators—professional or amateur—so we can see who tends to get things right over time and who doesn’t. Hell, if some clever person wanted to build an API for this, predictive blog posts could probably be tagged by their authors, culled and aggregated automatically, then scored down the line hot-or-not style.